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It was the summer of 2013. I was moving back to New York after 17 years as a London reporter for The New York Times. The house was a lonely wasteland of packed boxes and little bits of useless detritus. I had a one-way ticket home.

But a major news story was brewing, and word wafted down from the upper echelons of the newsroom: I was not allowed to leave the country until the very pregnant Duchess of Cambridge, the person formerly known as Kate Middleton, gave birth to the next heir to the British throne. And so I joined hundreds of representatives from the world’s great (and less great) news media outlets, all of us waiting around for an event that, when it finally happened, was recorded by the satirical Private Eye magazine as: “Woman Has Baby.”

Even readers of a serious newspaper in a country that long ago violently declared its independence from monarchs with English accents, it seems, love royal stories. Whenever we write them, as we did earlier this week when Prince Harry, fifth in line to the throne, announced his engagement to the American actress Meghan Markle, they jump to the top of the paper’s “most viewed” and “most emailed” lists.

Though I spent only a small percentage of my time in London covering the royals, I was there for many of the big-ticket events: the breakup of the marriage between Prince Charles and Diana, the Princess of Wales; Diana’s death; Charles’s remarriage; and assorted other occasions of interest and intrigue.

Part of the reason readers gravitate toward those stories, I think, is a latent fascination with the idea of upper-class Britain as a refined throwback to a simpler, more snobbishly hierarchical age — the same thing that makes television shows like “Downton Abbey” and “The Crown” such guilty pleasures. Part of it is that at a time of bewildering change, the Windsors represent reliability and continuity. No matter what happens, there they are.

Also, because there is so little material of any substance to go on, because the public is allowed to see only public events — a princess gets married, a duke gets divorced, a prince gets a job as a helicopter pilot, the queen uses the phrase “annus horribilis” in a speech — we impose on them any narrative we like. We use them as prisms for discussions of privilege, of class, of tradition, of race (in the case of Ms. Markle), of what Britain was and what it should be. We examine them through their sometimes parasitic, sometimes symbiotic relationship with the British news media, which treats them at times as if they were little more than upper-crust Kardashians.

Covering the British royal family isn’t like covering a normal family. You’re not going to get anything out of them. They’re masters of the no-content remark. Their public appearances are tightly controlled, and their activities most days — showing up at charity events, making boring remarks and leaving — are not in themselves raucously exciting to behold. When they give interviews, it’s usually to British news organizations, and always under the most anodyne of circumstances.

And of course they’re not our royal family, so it’s hard to regard them with anything like the awe they provoke in pro-monarchy Britons. (Many Britons, of course, wish they would just go away.) I’ve met a few of them, and I can report that they are much as you might imagine, only more so.

Once, at a meet-the-princess lunch, I watched Diana reduce a bunch of seasoned (male) American foreign correspondents to spineless blobs of obsequious jelly competing to express their sympathy for how hard her life must be and bragging about how arduous their jobs were. (“Richard Gere is renting a house down the street from me, and so I can see something of what you must go through every day with the paparazzi,” said one. “I work for a newspaper in Los Angeles, and have to write on deadline with an eight-hour time difference,” said another.)

My favorite royal encounter happened to an American friend some years ago. It was at a fancy party outside London at which the queen was a surprise guest. My friend had not yet had dinner, but she had had several glasses of Champagne.

A receiving line formed. The queen stood next to an aide whose job it was to whisper in her ear a little tidbit about the identity of each new person, including where they come from.

“I understand that you’re from Texas,” she said, as the line moved along. My friend, addled by drink and confused by the queen’s clipped accent, thought she said “Have you paid your taxes?”

And so she responded the way any American would, when asked such a personal question by a British monarch. Looking at the queen with her best republican expression, she declared, “No taxation without representation!”